Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 3063
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Wogan-Browne , Jocelyn
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Dead to the World? Death and the Maiden Revisited in Medieval Women's Convent Culture [This essay looks at letters and biographies in the convents of Heloise and her English and French colleagues against the social and cultural history of medieval death. Rejecting stereotypes of nuns as immured from the world in the gothic embrace of a grave, the essay explores a living culture of death in which women interceded on behalf of themselves and others, organized their cultural traditions, shaped institutional memory, and dealt with the administrative, practical, and symbolic aspects of nunnery cemeteries. Equipping women for the work of commemoration and communion with the dead was to equip them with the means of self-conscious shaping of their own and others’ lives and spiritualities. Abstract submitted to Feminae by the author.]
  • Source: Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents.  Edited by Translated by Vera Morton with an interpretive essay by Jocelyn Wogan-BrowneLibrary of Medieval Women.  D. S. Brewer, 2003.  Pages 157 - 180.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Essay
  • Subject (See Also): Barking, Greater London, England- Women's Monastery Cemeteries Commemoration Death Hagiography Monastic Enclosure Monasticism Relics
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: British Isles;France
  • Century: 11-12
  • Primary Evidence:
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  • Table:
  • Abstract:
  • Related Resources: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's essay, "Dead to the World? Death and the Maiden Revisited in Medieval Women's Convent Culture," offers a somewhat unexpected interpretation of the texts included in the volume, but, as we would expect of one of the leading scholars
  • Author's Affiliation: Fordham University
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2003.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 0859918254